Friday 29 July 2005 20.04 EDT
First published on Friday 29 July 2005 20.04 EDT

I first saw Gillo Pontecorvo's film, The Battle of Algiers, in a cinema about a hundred yards from King's Cross station. This must have been more than 30 years ago, long before King's Cross became a byword for death and disaster; the fire in 1987 and the bomb in July. In those days, what the name mainly suggested to me was the Edinburgh train - that and the area's reputation for streetwalkers and exiled Scottish drunks ("I wiz at El Alamein, I need tae get to Tooting, would you have two bob?"), and the fact, if it is a fact, that the station architecture was modelled on the tsar's riding stables in St Petersburg. The cinema specialised in films that weren't on general release - foreign films, old films - which was brave of its owners, considering its tatty location, and later it closed and became a rock venue or maybe a club. The building, I think, is still there.

Had it not been for the bomb on the Piccadilly line and its awful consequences, I would probably never have remembered where I saw The Battle of Algiers. Then, after July 7, I became slightly obsessed with a particular memory of the film, rented it on DVD, watched it twice, and recalled how much it had troubled me in 1971 or 1972 or whenever it was, and the argument I'd had with a friend as we walked together from the cinema to the tube, an argument about terrorism.

The first thing to say about The Battle of Algiers is that it's a thrilling, unsettling film, a tribute to the script of Franco Solinas and the music of Ennio Morricone as well as to the direction of Pontecorvo, who made nothing nearly as good before or after. It tells the story of the Algerian insurrection against the French in the late 1950s: first the revolt in the Algiers casbah, and then the repercussions from the French paratroops who were sent to quell it - terrorism and counter-terrorism - ending with a postcript that shows Algeria about to win independence from France in 1962. Pontecorvo shot his film only three years later - in Algiers, recreating real events and real characters in grainy black and white. It employs only one professional actor - Jean Martin, who plays the commander of the French paratroops, Colonel Mathieu. Sometimes you think you're watching a newsreel and sometimes a documentary. In fact, what you are always watching is a brilliant confection of reality.

Pontecorvo was a politically committed film-maker, a Marxist who had joined the anti-fascist resistance in Italy during the second world war, and his film came out of a desire to dramatise and humanise the struggle against colonialism. If the key text of the time was Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961 with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre, then The Battle of Algiers, which was banned in France for several years, could be seen as its cinematic equivalent. Except that it isn't. Such was the spirit of the mid-60s, at least among the kind of people who went to art-house cinemas, that Pontecorvo seems to have taken it for granted that his audience's sympathy would instinctively side with the rebellious Algerians, the Muslims of the casbah. The historical injustice of their situation is never spelled out. Instead, Pontecorvo focuses narrowly on the conflict, trying to deepen our understanding of the barbarous behaviour on both sides, bombs from the Algerians and torture from the French.

As I looked at it again, what struck me was its prescience; how it described a world now familiar to all of us, when at the time of its appearance in 1965 it described only a particular Algerian world that had recently been left behind. As paratroops raid a house, a helicopter hovers overhead. Hidden cameras film Muslims as they leave the casbah for the French quarter and the footage is played before an audience of paratroops. (How can you spot a terrorist? You can't.) Mathieu draws the cell structure of the rebels on a blackboard, three or four people to each cell, no cell knowing another. "Four hundred thousand Arabs live in the casbah," Mathieu says. "Are they all our enemies? We know they're not." He cuts a sympathetic figure, despite his dark glasses and his brutal strategy - the only workable one he knows, - which is to find some likely suspects and torture information from them. He has fought in the French resistance as well as Vietnam. When at a press conference someone mentions a pro-independence newspaper piece by Sartre, Mathieu wonders why "the Sartres are always on the other side".

The most terrible moments come when three women leave the casbah to plant their bombs. First, they are asked to dress as Francophile women to avoid detection at the checkpoints. Then they rendezvous with a bomb-maker who attaches a timer to each device. Each woman now goes her own way with a bomb in her basket - to a café, a milk bar, and the offices of Air France. There they slyly slide their bombs under their stools and chairs they sit on, pushing them back with their heels. The French are entirely innocent of their fate, ordinary people doing ordinary things. Young couples dance to jukebox music, a little boy licks an ice-cream, a Frenchman offers his seat to one of the bombers as she stands at the bar and orders a Coke. Pontecorvo splices the scenes of their unbearable unknowingness with shots of a clock as its hands move towards 5.45. The women leave, the bombs explode. The camera captures the shock and incomprehension of the bloodied survivors as they stumble from the wreckage. We never see the boy and his ice-cream again.

Even though the Provisional IRA had begun its bombing campaign in Northern Ireland when I saw The Battle of Algiers I think it was the film rather than any news coverage that made terrorism real to me. It was those scenes that led to the argument with my friend as we walked towards the tube. I said something like: "Terrorism is an awful thing." My friend wasn't so shocked. What he saw in the film was the difficult route to victory in a liberation struggle - the omelette that needed the broken eggs. He pointed out, rightly, that the French had air-bombed Algerian villages. A leader of the FLN, the Algerian liberation movement makes the same point in the film when he is verbally attacked by a French journalist for deploying bombs in baskets to kill innocent civilians: "Give us your bombers [your aircraft] and you can have our baskets."

My problem may have been - may still be - a want of empathic imagination. I could see myself as a European in a café, my son eating an ice-cream, but less easily as a Berber villager cowering under the sound of French jets. That is a common problem (Pontecorvo himself may have been afflicted by it). I don't say that it accounts for July 7, far less excuses it. Still, you don't have to be George Galloway to see some truth trickling down from Sartre's statement about the liberation struggles of 50 years ago. In the introduction to Fanon's book, he wrote: "It is the moment of the boomerang."